The IETF Hackathon, held the weekend preceding the main IETF meeting (17-18 March), will include at least four projects directly related to IoT, with the possibility of more being added. More information is on the Hackathon wiki.

lack of some layer 2 services like complete device connectivity and broadcast/multicast

They have some interesting work queued up, including discussion of a revision to RFC 6775 (Neighbor Discovery Optimization for IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPANs)). They will be meeting on Thursday afternoon in London.

The IPv6 over the TSCH mode of IEEE 802.15.4e (6tisch) WGwas chartered in 2014 to enable IPv6 for the Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) mode that was recently added to IEEE 802.15.4 networks. The 6top Protocol (6P) ID was recently revised and is in IESG last call on its way to adoption – it enables distributed scheduling in 6TiSCH networks. Among the interesting things on their agenda is planning for the next F-Interop 6TiSCH Interoperability event. They are meeting on Wednesday afternoon in London.

The Home Networking (homenet) WGfocuses on the evolving networking technology within and among relatively small “residential home” networks. For example, an obvious trend in home networking is the proliferation of networking technology in an increasingly broad range and number of devices. They will be meeting in London on Friday morning and discussing several interesting IDs.

I also want to (again) draw your attention to a very interesting (Standards Track) Internet Draft being discussed in the Operations and Management Area Working Group (opsawg) which seems to hold significant promise, and which appears to be gaining some serious traction: “Manufacturer Usage Description Specification“ (MUD). From the abstract: This memo specifies a component-based architecture for manufacturer usage descriptions (MUD). The goal of MUD is to provide a means for Things to signal to the network what sort of access and network functionality they require to properly function. The initial focus is on access control. Later work can delve into other aspects. The opsawg meeting will be held on Monday afternoon.

If you have an interest in how the IoT is developing and being standardized in the IETF, I hope to see you in person or online at some of these meetings during IETF 101. (Note that If you know you will be unable to travel to the meeting and would like to participate remotely, you must register as a remote participant. There is no fee to be a remote participant at an IETF meeting but registration is required. If you do not want to register, you may opt to listen to the live audio stream of the sessions instead.